The assessment of the quality of a video sequence is of importance when characterizing the performance of a video distribution network, of a transmission or compression algorithm, or of any other hard- or software involved in the creation, transmission, storage, rendering or handling of video data.
Depending on the test situation, the original video sequence may or may not be available when assessing the quality of a given sequence. The present invention relates to so called “no reference models”, where the quality of a potentially imperfect video sequence has to be derived without knowledge of the original video sequence.
For example, an unknown video sequence is captured at the receiving end of a video transmission channel and then used as an input for video quality rating. The main output is a video rating score or objective video MOS.
Conventionally, the video quality rating is carried out by a group of human watchers, where each member of the group attributes an opinion score to the sequence. The scores of a plurality of test watchers can be averaged to obtain a mean opinion score.
It is desirable to automate this process, replacing the subjective element of the test watchers with an automated method suitable to yield a value close to the mean opinion score, the so called “objective mean opinion score” MOSo.